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Min Hyoung Song, “What Is a Child? Asian Americans and Comics”

March 9, 2015

Tuesday, March 31, 2015 - 4:00pm

Ohio Staters, Inc. Founders Room (2nd floor, Ohio Union)

The Asian American Studies Program is pleased to welcome Professor Min Hyoung Song to give the 2015 Distinguished Lecture in Asian American Studies. In this presentation, Professor Song will discuss the relations among race, visuality, and childhood in Asian American comics.

Despite some efforts to be more racially inclusive toward Asians and Asian Americans, films and television shows continue to uphold damaging racial norms that shape our collective visual field. In contrast, both popular and more serious comic books are now actively unraveling such norms. Asian American comic book artists in particular have grown in number and influence, and in the process exhibit a strong tendency to reveal the grey areas between childhood and adulthood. As a result, their works ask us, What is a child?

Min Hyoung Song is Professor of English at Boston College where he specializes in Asian American, ethnic American, and twentieth-century American literature, with a special interest in cultural studies and literary theory. He is the author of Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Duke, 2002) and The Children of 1965: On Writing, and Not Writing, as an Asian American (Duke, 2013), which won the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Prize in Literary Criticism, the Alpha Sigma Nu Award in Literature and Fine Arts, and was named Honorable Mention for the Association for the Study of the Arts in the Present (ASAP) Book Prize. For more information, visit http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/english/faculty/facalpha/song.html.